Old Santa dropped off a late Christmas present to Tim Hodgdon last week, another win for his baby, Comanche, the world’s fastest monohull sailing yacht.

Right after Christmas, the 100-foot long speedster was the first to cross the finish line in one of the world’s toughest sailing races, the 628-mile trek down the Australian coast from Sydney to Hobart. “She goes like a scalded cat,” said the proud East Boothbay boat builder. “And, she will do 30 knots.”

In case you are a statistics freak, she won the Aussie race in two days, five hours, three minutes and 36 seconds. It was the fifth time she led the field in the Down Under classic. In 2017, she found ideal conditions for the Sydney-Hobart match and won going away with a time of just one day, nine hours, 15 minutes and 24 seconds.

In 2014, Tim and his crew built the French-designed vessel using state-of-the-art composite high-tech materials. They launched her from Tim’s former East Boothbay yard on a bright October day to the cheers of hundreds of fans. In 2016, she showed her heels to the sailing world by running from New York to England in five days, 14 hours and 21 minutes, beating the record by over a day.

Comanche is just the latest project for the Hodgdon family that has built sail and motor vessels in the Boothbay region since 1816, not long after the president imposed a trade blockade barring Americans from shipping goods to Europe in 1807. The president at the time was a Virginia guy named Thomas Jefferson. You might have heard of him. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, some 250 years ago. Look for a national effort this year to celebrate that document, as it is a momentous occasion. Mr. Jefferson was a fine writer, and he had good editors for the Declaration. They were guys named Ben Franklin, John Adams and the rest of the founding fathers, who were huddled in Philadelphia.

Note that most writers hate editors who tamper with their sacred prose, but editors, time after time, save the writer’s bacon. Bless editors all.

While we celebrate the Declaration as American scripture, President Jefferson did not do as well as a political economist, as his Embargo choked off our coastal New England European trade. Jefferson acted, in part, because British navy ships, which lacked the number of sailors to man their warships, tended to stop American ships and kidnap the American sailors, claiming they were really Englishmen.

Meanwhile, the Embargo hammered Wiscasset merchants who were enjoying a booming lumber trade with England. They found themselves without customers. Almost immediately, their business dried up and, they say, many a fine shirt was lost. The next time you stop to admire the grand Wiscasset mansions, you might notice they were all built before 1807, when the Embargo was imposed. Some accounts tell us their tiny harbor was filled with as many as 30 empty ships waiting for the Embargo to lift.

Now, it didn’t take long for some shippers to hook up with like-minded sailors to ignore the Embargo and evade the British navy. You mean to tell me there was smuggling on the Maine coast? You think?

A couple of years later, Jefferson’s Embargo morphed into the War of 1812, turning our peaceful coastal “Vacationland” into a war zone. Records tell us that after Sunday church services, our forebearers sat on a sunny Sunday afternoon and watched the American schooner Enterprise whip the British Brig Boxer. Sometimes, British frigates captured our trading vessels. Occasionally, they anchored off Squirrel Island, forcing our forebearers to band together to drive off boatloads of Royal Marines raiding our shores. At that time, Maine was attached to Massachusetts.

 While Tim Hodgdon and his crew have built dozens of exquisite yachts, in recent years, they have moved on to other projects, including building more than 30 specialized tenders to help owners and guests go ashore when they tire of lounging on the deck of the Destroyer-sized super yachts. Tim told me he has other projects in the works, but declined to describe them.

In recent years, he relocated most of his marine shops to Southport Island, where his daughter Audrey has become the sixth generation in the Hodgdon clan to build, repair, store, and provide maritime services to the men and women who are drawn to our shores and work for our craftsmen. Somehow it seems proper that the fastest monohull racing yacht in the world was born in our backyard, where the shores of East Boothbay frame the Damariscotta River.

Congratulations, Tim & Co, on Comanche’s win in the Sydney-Hobart race. I wonder what wonders will be the next project to slide down his ways.